Summer Treats for the Eyes and Mind

In my last three posts I’ve covered the state of this spring’s crop of MFA graduates, and I’ll still cover the Stanford and Berkeley MFA exhibitions next week. But in the meantime, this month, there is a wealth of great shows by several of my favorite artists!

Tonight, John Berggruen Gallery opens an exhibition of recent paintings by one of my favorite painters, Diane Andrews Hall. “New Work” opens on June 3rd, and will run through Saturday, June 26th. An opening reception is tonight, June 3, from 5:30-7:30.

“New Work” reveals Hall’s intuitive connection with nature and her immediate surroundings. Drawing on coastal scenes and views from her own backyard, Hall poetically evokes the enduring presence of the ocean as well as the fragility and brevity of a hovering hummingbird. Hall has dealt with these themes before, but light — in all of its variations and subtleties — is truly the formal subject of this new series. She captures a single fleeting moment in nature with works that unveil her interest in translating photography to the painted canvas, and through this translation, making the image come alive. The artist uses a laborious technique of applying layers upon layers of glaze in order to achieve the pervasive translucent quality and illusion of depth apparent in the blurred backgrounds, fluttering wings, and the late afternoon reflection on the waves’ surface. Hall shows, once again, she is as much the observer and interpreter of her habitat as she is recipient and guardian of its phenomena.

And she is one of the most talented painters of the natural world I’ve ever seen.

Another treat for the eyes and mind also debuts at the Meridian Gallery tonight, just a few blocks away from Berggruen, and features yet two more of my favorite artists, Leigha Mason and John DeFazio. Both of them combine a genuinely twisted sense of humor with outrageous talent and craft.

“The Candy Store,” an exhibition of their works curated by Jarrett Earnest, brings together ceramic sculpture, drawings, collage, and hundreds of sculpted candies that explore the complicated tangles of desire and death in contemporary life. Earnest writes, “In the digital era, when many are excited about the disembodied nature of the Internet and indulgence in technological fantasies of “curing” death, these two artists movingly present work about the psychological experience of embodiment and the importance of our own mortality.”

“Leigha Mason will be creating an entire candy shop in the gallery space, complete with hundreds of resin and sugar candy sculptures that contain fingernails and hair. Drawings and videos accompany the installation elaborating the persona of the store’s fictitious owner Sharon Mae Folly, a former Snow White impersonator fired because of her increasingly aged appearance, creating a complex and deeply felt celebration of childhood fantasy. Mason attended the San Francisco Art Institute and The New School, New York. She currently lives in Brooklyn.”

“John deFazio combines mythology, art history, and Pop culture to forge funerary urns dedicated to figures as diverse as John F. Kennedy Jr. and Madonna. These meticulously crafted objects drenched in cotton-candy colored glazes often explore gay aesthetics. Also on display are a series of 100 “Xerox collages,” each illustrating a different canto of Dante’s Divine Comedy. John deFazio teaches sculpture at the San Francisco Art Institute and the California College of the Art. He has exhibited at the Venice Biennale and the Museum of Art and Design, New York, and is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the deYoung Museum, San Francisco.”

Also don’t miss the work of Jim Campbell, one of my all-time favorite artists, at Hosfelt Gallery this month. Through the use of state-of-the-art LED technology, his new-media “paintings” appear to come alive. By placing blinking LED displays behind transparencies mounted on Plexiglas, he creates stunning, animated environments like his “Grand Central Station 5″ (2010), where shadowy figures appear to float through the train station’s atrium.

In his newest work, he’s gone from a two-dimensional image to using a grid of LEDs that create an image moving in a three-dimensional space. I was fortunate to experience it while visiting his show at the Bryce Wolkowitz gallery in New York a few months ago, and it’s certainly a revolutionary new form of art. More than a thousand LEDs hang in vertical rows — visually something that appears to be a large rectangular box of lights. Specific lights illuminate and then darken, creating a mysterious, evocative three dimensional image.

Campbell is a major innovator in the field of inter-media (artwork that incorporates technology), and he’s widely considered one of the pioneering artists of the twenty-first century – his works shouldn’t be missed. The show is up through June 19th.